Thursday, September 22, 2016

Update: Chair of Trump's Campaign in Mahoning County Quits After Making Ignorant Remarks

Quick update: Kathy Miller, discussed below, has resigned from her volunteer gig as the chair of Donald Trump's campaign in Mahoning County.

“My personal comments were inappropriate, and I apologize," she said. "I am not a spokesperson for the campaign and was not speaking on its behalf. I have resigned as the volunteer campaign chair in Mahoning County and as an elector to the Electoral College to avoid any unnecessary distractions.”

She still stood by her assertion that racism didn't exist before President Obama took office.

Original story here:

Kathy Miller, the chair of Donald Trump's campaign in Mahoning County, has some pretty incredible things to say about racism in America: namely, that it's all Barack Obama's fault.

It's hard to find the words for Miller's breathtakingly ignorant ideas about the country's black population. "I don't think there was any racism until Obama got elected," she says. "We never had problems like this. I'm in the real estate industry; there's none." Note that Trump and his father, barons of the real estate world, were investigated by the federal government in the 1970s for developing a system for barring black families from renting his New York City properties.

It's curious, also, what Miller might make of the history of redlining in American real estate and urban development.

Miller rambles a bit about "the people with the guns and shooting up neighborhoods." It comes off as senility, but then again it's quite clear that she harbors particular resentment toward African Americans.

"If you're black and you haven't been successful in the last 50 years, it's your own fault," she says as the interviewer becomes visibly uncomfortable. It's the same sort of "Get a job!" tripe that Trump supporters have been spewing at protesters all year.